Blog

Kat's Review of Lost Souls by Neil White (Garrett & McGanity #2)

Synopsis: A woman is found brutally murdered on a quiet housing estate, her tongue and eyes ritualistically gouged out.

Children are being abducted and then returned to their family’s days later without a scratch and with no knowledge or where they have been - or with whom. If DC Laura McGanity thought moving from London to sleepy Lancashire was taking the easy option then she can think again. Already worried about uprooting young son Bobby to follow her reporter boyfriend Jack Garrett back to his hometown, she must quickly get a handle on these mystifying cases terrifying the people of Blackley - without putting the local officers' noses out of joint.

Meanwhile, restless Jack is itching to get back to his writing and the cases provide the perfect opportunity to do so. But as he delves deeper into them, he finds murky connections between the two crimes and skeletons buried in the most unlikely of closets.

Most astonishing of all, he meets a man who 'paints' the future - terrible events come to him in vivid dreams which he then puts onto canvas. This 'precognition' is not so much a gift as a curse and to Jack it becomes terrifyingly that many people, including his own family, are in danger…

My Review: I enjoyed the first book in this series and was looking forward to getting stuck in to book 2. This time around Laura and Jack have relocated from London back up to Lancashire and are starting afresh. I liked both Jack and Laura in the first book and nothing has changed since then. They are easy to read characters and the writing has a nice easy flow about it. The opener of this latest book sets the scene for what Laura will have to deal with working alongside new colleagues in her job as a police officer.

Laura’s colleague on the job Pete was a really good character and one that I hope I get to see again. However, nobody else within the book made that much of an impression on me. The storyline was certainly okay, but in my opinion it didn't feel strong enough. That may sound slightly ‘wishy-washy’ but it’s the only description I can think of. There is quite a lot of action and when the characters are introduced they all seem to interlink somewhere along which certainly kept me interested. I just couldn't help but feel like something was missing and whatever that something was, it just didn't make the story that memorable for me.

Jack and Laura obviously clash heads within their personal lives due to the nature of their respective careers. However, with that in mind I couldn't help but feel like that rule only applied when the story suited. Overall, I am finding this review hard to write, or even explain in any great details. What I will say is that it’s certainly not a bad book, just one that could do with being better. Seeing as Neil White has such a great following and has gone on to write another 3 in this series I will certainly be continuing in the hope that the next book doesn't leave me feeling the same way.